Racial Equity Capacity Building Initiative

We believe the diversity of our community is one of Alexandria’s greatest assets. ACT for Alexandria is embarking on a journey with our colleagues across the City to achieve a future when race no longer predicts one’s outcomes in life; when everyone has what they need to thrive, no matter what neighborhood they live in, the color of their skin, their gender, or where they were born.

As Alexandria’s community foundation, this vision of a vibrant community is core to our work. In order to move this vision forward, we asked 250 nonprofit, civic and business leaders at the recent IMPACT 2019: Racial Equity Forum what they need. Here’s what they said:

Training for board and staff members

Resources to learn more about racial equity

Convening people in a safe space to have conversations to learn with and from one another

Developing leaders and creating a pipeline of people to serve on boards and commissions

Funding for organizations to get started or continue this work

To address these needs, we are kicking off a Racial Equity Capacity Building Initiative. It includes:

Workshops that address what it means to be an ally for racial equity and build bridges to ensure equity, opportunity and inclusion for everyone. These one-day workshops will be open to everyone in the community. Sponsored by Kaiser Permanente and The Bruhn-Morris Family Foundation.

A Design Lab with participants from the workshops to capture feedback about their desired continued learnings around racial equity with the goal of creating a peer cohort group, which began in October 2019.

A six-month Learning Lab to equip leaders in effective racial equity implementation in their organizations.

Community conversations that bring people together for dialogue to build deeper understanding and surface new ideas and solutions.

Capacity-building grants that help nonprofits build know-how and knowledge about racial equity with their staff, board and constituents.

Participate in Our Racial Equity Capacity Building Initiative Events:

Allyship workshops: What does it mean to be an ally for racial justice? ACT has hosted 7 sold-out workshops in 2019 and the next workshops will be held on March 24 and May 14. The Allyship Workshops, led by Whitney Parnell, Executive Director and Co-Founder of Service Never Sleeps, are designed to help you learn more about how you can use your areas of privilege to advance racial justice and begin your journey of adopting an allyship lifestyle. These one-day workshops are open to individuals living in or serving the Alexandria community.

Register for March 24(Note: this session is for Board members of Alexandria organizations or commissions) UPDATE: ACT has decided to postpone the Allyship Workshop scheduled for Tuesday, March 24 due to growing public health concerns related to the COVID-19 (coronavirus) outbreak. We do not wish to risk the health and safety of anyone in our community. We will reschedule this workshop at a later date.